Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 25-31 May, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Will the Russians ever leave?
• The Pope issues an encyclical on AI (more regulation wanted)
• Memorial Day in the USA
• Blue Origin rocket explodes, hurts NASA's moon plans

Monday 25 May 2026

This is Memorial Day in the USA. First called Decoration Day.

And now we have an alliance with the Pope and Anthropic. Note the past fussing between the Pope, a Chicago democrat, and our current President.

And here is the Pope's take on AI. It is full of high words and concepts. It can be interpreted as you wish. Such is that. Oh, and being a Democrat from Chicago, the Pope calls for regulation. Regulators gotta' regulate, no matter how far they have travelled.

Let's all make a digital twin of ourselves to handle, well, you know, those things that come along.

A little AI dictionary. They play it straight. I wish for something like the Devil's Dictionary and similar computer editions.

Thoughts on the history of teaching grammar and other things writers should know.

On self-publishing: I tend to tell them to focus on learning how to be a storyteller first, then learn the publishing side slowly.

Okay freelance writers, boost your income with a podcast. Maybe.

Some writers earn a big living from writing one novel every few years. They have many other demands on their time other than writing. Some tips on doing all that well.

A call to improve how we ask questions.

I like this piece from Seth Godin. We are in chaos now as new tools (AI) have arrived and are advancing quickly. There is much short-term pain as we learn to create long-term gain. Godin explains it well.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

SpaceX had a partial success in its launch of Starship V3. This is one story covering the event.

The CEO of Google on AI anxiety and such. Far more informed than the Pope's views.

China sends three persons to its space station. One may stay a year.

A few ne'er-do-wells are becoming famous. That is not good.

At this time, the experts are predicting which jobs will be replaced by AI. Let us recall that history shows the experts to be wrong most of the time.

This guy gets it. Quoting: the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field's history

Quoting the headline: Snap Specs True AR Glasses Reportedly Launch This Fall For Around $2500 We shall see what happens. The promise has been there for at least five decades.

And now we have anti-tech violent extremism. Add prefixes and suffixes as you deem appropriate.

Meanwhile in China, the governors restrict travel of the brightest AI talent as they don't want them to stay where they travel or talk too much. Ah, censorship at its finest.

Meanwhile in Iran where censorship also flourishes, the governors supposedly open Internet access after 87 days.

AI quickly generates the material needed for a lawsuit. Too quickly as the American court system cannot meet the new demands. Hmm. One group of people quickly use new tools. Another group of people, uh, er, what? Learn something new? Guess which group is a bunch of government employees.

The Waymo robotaxis have been a blessing to the blind.

Since the chattering bots arrived, phony references in biomedical papers increases 12x (that is 12 times not 12%).

Quoting: Despite the growing hysteria over AI's threat to white-collar jobs, there's still scant evidence that the technology has had a large-scale impact on the labor market.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Meanwhile in Japan, engineers run tests on the way to building a ramjet engine that will push a commercial airliner at Mach 5. It promises a 2-hour flight to the USA. It is not coming real soon now with a guess at the 2040s.

Microsoft shows a thing called WebWright that allows building multiple browser sessions running at the same time.

AI is already creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the USA.

Let Claude Code et al. write all the code. Ooop$! This co$t much more than people thought it would. It is sort of like cloud computing. The bill$ roll in and ...

Over $100Billion (with a B) of parts and supplies for Nvidia come from Taiwan. It is difficult, not impossible but difficult, to imagine the Communist Party of China having its military wing invade Taiwan and disrupt all that.

And now we have some sort of standard test for AI that writes computer programs.

Alive and well is one of the world's older professions: smuggling.

Powered by AI, little startups are challenging the mainline consultancy firms. AI was not the tool. Wikipedia was. Good grief, how far behind are some journalists?

Anthropic Claude and Clawed whatever: too much credit given to something that isn't that credible.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party is updating its watchful eye over its subjects.

This AI boom is spreading the wealth with companies completely unfamiliar to me being valued in the billion$ (with a B).

Here is one story.

Here is another.

SpaceX has become the dominant supplier of Internet access to American commercial airlines.

Quoting the headline: Did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI? The answer is "probably" leaning towards, "Oh yes. Definitely. Are you kidding?"

The USA is wide open and vulnerable to drone attacks. The experts agree with the short story I wrote some 15 years ago. Oh well.

Thursday 28 May 2026

Okay here we go with NASA and the base on the moon. The schedule says 2032. That is far enough in the future so that there can be a dozen extensions.

Open-source, 3D printer plans to jump start experiments in humanoid robots.

We used to go to Stack Overflow for answers to questions about programming. Then the chattering bots came along to answer all questions. The folks running Stack Overflow have found ways to make money in this period of chaos.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI Is the World's Most Unprofitable Company, and It's Still Growing

I learn a new word -- RAMageddon -- and we have a new excuse for everything.

There was a time when communities welcomed new business.

By some measure from some group that measures these things, London jumps over Paris to be Europe's technology hub.

It is semi-official: we are making more semiconductors in the US. That is a good thing to reduce the supply chain risk.

We should see more of this as the bigger companies have their own tools in AI instead of using the same tools from OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. used by their competitors. Yes, Coca Cola will have its own system that differs from what Pepsi uses.

Meanwhile in Illinois, a bill is moving through the legislature that would require, and get this one, an independent third-party group to watch AI companies.

Our Dept of Defense (War) awards $9.7Billion (with a B) IT contract to Dell. The reports all report that Mr. Dell donated $6.25Billion of his personal money to Trump accounts for children. Was that a bribe or a magnanimous gift? Perhaps both. So be it. The money was given to a good cause.

OpenAI gives hundred$ of million$ to charity. How do they do this when they are losing money at record rates?

IBM and subsidiary RedHat launch Project Lightwell, backed by a $5 billion investment and a planned deployment of roughly 20,000 engineers worldwide to make open-source software better.

Our soldiers go places. They bring their personal smartphone with them. Ne'er-do-wells use commercial systems to track the smartphones and threaten the types of things that ne'er-do-wells threaten.

Friday 29 May 2026

How do you build 27,000 robots a day? Step one: build a 5.3million square foot factory.

SpaceX is awarded the $2.29 billion (with a B) contract for the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone. It is to connect sensor to shooter in all domains in all places at all times.

Quote one: The best thing you can do for your stakeholder is avoid building unnecessary things. Quote two: Figuring out what should not be built is one of your biggest contributions. Smarter people write less software, not more.

In a similar vein, quoting: It (AI) does not lower the cost of being wrong.

Once you code less and are wrong less often, fast is still better than slow.

OpenAI claims to have created a bio-defense tool and is sharing it with our Federal government.

The value of Lenovo's stock has doubled this month.

Blue Origin suffers a setback as a rocket explodes on pad a day before launch. And this hurts NASA as Blue Origin was supposed to send several early supply ships to the moon.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Secretary to the Treasury admits the obvious. They can use new productivity tools or just sit around doing nothing for the public.

Once again Microsoft changes the look of Copilot. They are trying, so I give them credit for that.

Let's run a simulation of the world run by AI. I suppose there are worse things to do with all that computing power. Wasn't that the idea behind that Sims game?

Quoting: Dell reports Q1 AI server revenue up 757% YoY to $16.1B. How do you even calculate a gain percentage like that?

Overall, Dell almost doubled its revenue this quarter.

Meanwhile at Amazon, they had a scoreboard of AI use. Its like someone tied their Fitbit to a machine to record 500,000 steps a day or something.

IBM plans to spend $10Billion over five years on quantum computing.

Waymo shows a new robotaxi. Like the cabs in London, this is built with riders in mind. Well, its about time.

Quoting the headline: Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon C, an entry-level ARM-based SoC for Windows 11 devices starting from $300 and shipping in 2026, taking aim at the MacBook Neo

Thoughts on Roku TV. Yes, people like to save money on things.

Wired reviews HP's $600 laptop that competes with the MacBook Neo.

Saturday 30 May 2026

Strong rumors about Apple's iOS27 announcements for 8 June WWDC.

Must-see video if you like big explosions. Blue Origin's big blow up.

It seems that every week in this AI boom someone states the obvious. This one is, "It pays to know what you are doing."

This piece shows that some folks haven't received the message above. Since the computer is doing the work, do much more work than necessary. It seems to impress the brain-dead managers.

Here is another example: package managers that manage other packages that manage ... Folks, people manage work. Software does some basic loops, if, and if, etc. It would be nice if people understood this.

SpaceX is awarded a $4.16B contract to build a space-based tracking network as part of Golden Dome defensive shield. SpaceX had three big wins this week: two defense-related and one commercial.

Computex 2026 rumors. Good stuff ahead. I am most interested in a personal computer powered by an Nvidia CPU/GPU.

Paraphrase: Strong rumors that Microsoft is developing a new AI-focused app that would bring together its currently fragmented Copilot ecosystem into a single interface.

In exchange for free home cleaning, someone videos your home in great detail to gather data for training robots. Make that trade? It shows how much value some companies place on data.

Apple boost production of the MacBook Neo as high demand surprised everyone.

Sunday 31 May 2026

There is much about Bill Gates that I do not admire and never have. He has, however, given away billion$ to some good causes. There are worse things a person like him could do. Cut him some slack? Why not? Everyone cuts me a lot of slack.

Microsoft is moving its flat rate use of Copilot on GitHub to pay what you use. Will everyone else follow? What about Office 365 or whatever it is called? What about... the list goes on and on to Netflix et al.

The writers attempt to describe AI Dark Output. We are still in the chaos phase of change due to the new tools. Most are attempting to use metrics from the prior status quo to measure what is happening now and frustration is high because that just doesn't work. Patience may be a virtue, but it is also rare.

Samsung releases a new line of monitors aimed at users of Apple computers.

MIT researchers find a much better way to extract lithium and other useful things from rocks.

Hmm. Another use of facial recognition to catch a ne'er-do-well. Hmm.

With everyone creating software via these chattering bot, software companies and all the programmers were to ... oh well, experts wrong again.

The part of the market held by Duck Duck Go is tiny. It did have a big gain since Google tossed more AI into its systems. Still tiny.

There is a camera near our local high school to catch some sort of driving misbehavior. I have wondered why the kids haven't put garbage bags over it yet.

Someone studies and creates categories of the dark patterns of these chattering bots.

Quoting: China is seeing a surge in a new kind of tech tourism where visitors pay up to $9,000 for curated tours of electric-vehicle factories, robotaxis, and artificial intelligence and robotics companies.